Sir Keir Starmer will sign a new strategic partnership with Brussels at a summit on 19 May. The draft preamble apparently states that the UK and the EU are committed to similar ‘geopolitical values’. This is all part of Labour’s ‘reset’ with Europe intended to return Britain to the EU’s orbit in everything from phytosanitary and food safety alignment to defence and security.
That Britain and the EU share geopolitical values is no scoop. Such utterances are the ‘motherhood and apple pie’ of all summits. Where allies so often disagree is less on objectives than priorities. Aligning Britain’s defence and security with the EU will mean bowing to the EU’s priorities – which are not always the same as the UK’s.
Locking Britain’s defence and security into Brussels decision-making is a step too far
Take Ukraine. Both Britain and the EU were agreed on the objective of maintaining Ukraine’s independence before Russia’s invasion. But Britain began doing something about it years before by training Ukrainian forces. When EU members were presented with intelligence from Britain and the US detailing Putin’s forthcoming invasion, they chose to ignore it.
Even after the 24 February 2022 invasion, unlike Britain, the EU was painfully slow to react. And the EU’s eventual assistance was half-hearted and timid. Of the EU’s largest military powers, Germany dragged its feet in supplying lethal weaponry, and France’s contribution was minimal and dwarfed by Britain’s, which took the lead in resisting Putin’s invasion. Even in areas where the EU had financial clout, like sanctions, it was divided and weak. To this day, France remains Europe’s primary and largest point of entry for Russian liquefied gas, having increased imports by 81 per cent between 2023 and 2024, filling Putin’s coffers with €2.6 billion (£2.2 billion) in the process. The EU’s lamentable performance over Ukraine has allowed Putin to triumph, validating the old description of the EU as ‘a military worm’.
For all the EU’s warm words for Ukraine, London and Brussel’s priorities were rarely aligned. Labour’s new defence and security pact with the EU, negotiated since September by the Minister for the Cabinet Office, Nick Thomas-Symonds, with contributions from the Foreign Office and Defence Secretary John Healey, is clearly against the national interest. In committing to not diverging from EU foreign and defence policy, it will seriously limit Britain’s strategic autonomy and lessen her reactivity in a crisis.
The defence and security pact’s negative implications are more far-reaching than just shackling Britain to a divided and unresponsive entity. It will deny Britain autonomy worldwide with our effective existing allies and partners. Our commitment to the AUKUS agreement (bitterly maligned by Brussels at France’s behest) will be undermined. That dynamic partnership with the US and Australia for the Indo-Pacific covers joint submarine construction, operation and technological cooperation on new-generation weaponry, potentially with new partners such as Japan.
By committing Britain to participate in EU defence industrial programmes, not only will AUKUS suffer, but so too will existing defence procurement projects with non-EU partners, such as the Tempest 6th generation fighter aircraft built with Japan. Britain will be strong-armed into joining the ailing Franco-German project, where she can expect to be a forlorn partner.
The government will argue that Britain will be able to tender for EU defence contracts. But to access the EU’s €150 billion (£128 billion) Security Action for Europe (SAFE) fund, the UK would be required to contribute to it financially. However, as a non-EU member, the UK would have limited influence over how these funds are allocated, raising concerns about paying into a system without proportional say in its governance. The implication is that Britain’s defence autonomy, jobs and defence know-how will be irreparably harmed.
It seems that the Defence and Security Pact will contain a requirement for Britain to sign up to a Security of Information Agreement with the EU, which will demand high-level intelligence sharing. This will prejudice one of the UK’s most prized strategic assets: its intelligence gathering and analysis. In turn, this could weaken the top-secret and strategic longstanding ‘Five Eyes’ intelligence cooperation with the US, Australia, Canada, New Zealand, not to mention the potential for security breaches from sharing with 27 EU members.
Britain and the EU may share ‘geopolitical values’, but locking Britain’s defence and security into Brussels decision-making for the foreseeable future is a step too far. There was a time when Starmer and Lammy were lamenting the rightward drift of EU member states. They will rue the day when Britain’s strategic defence autonomy cannot diverge from states with which we no longer see eye to eye.
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